Morphological differentiation between two Moroccan goat breeds

Abstract The objective of this study was to identify morphological measurements that best distinguish Moroccan Barcha and Atlas goat breeds. Ten measurements (body weight - BW, body length - BL, heart girth - HG, withers height - WH, rump height - WH, back length - BAL, neck length - NL, head length - HL, ear length - EL, and ear width - EW) of 876 adult animals of both sexes (547 Barcha and 329 Atlas) were studied. Average BW, HG and WH of Barcha goats were 37.4±11.1 kg, 75.0±5.26 cm and 71.8±3.41 cm, respectively. The corresponding values for Atlas goats were 38.8±8.92 kg, 76.2±5.56 cm and 72.3±4.11 cm, respectively. Most correlations were positive and significant, BW with BL (0.87) and BW with HG (0.91) being the highest for Barcha and Atlas breeds, respectively. The multivariate analysis of variance revealed significant (P < 0.001) differences in the morphological traits of Barcha and Atlas breeds. Variance components analysis showed that between-breed variability explained 11.26% of total variance. The factor analysis extracted two factors with a total variance of 66.9%. The first factor had high loadings for BW (0.93), BL (0.88), HG (0.87) and WH (0.90), whilst the second factor had high association with EW (0.80) and EL (0.79). Results of the stepwise discriminant analysis showed that out of 10 variables considered, six were found to be the most discriminant characters. The Mahalanobis distance of the morphological traits between Barcha and Atlas was 3.832 (P < 0.001). The developed discriminant function clearly discriminated and classified the Barcha and the Atlas goats into their breeds of origin, thus yielding after a cross-validation 87.2% and 78.1% correctly assigned to their source genetic group. It was concluded that there was a clear separation between Barcha and Atlas goats.